Saturday, September 29, 2018

This past week has been a
time of public testimony and political posturing. We have witnessed perhaps the
final gasp of the patriarchy in a naked abuse of power and contempt … and
finally being called to account. Dr. Christine Ford’s emotionally raw recall of
her traumatic event with its clarion ring of truth was in stark contrast to Brett
Kavanaugh’s seemingly rehearsed vehemence and, at times, sputtering evasion. Sounds
of authenticity and fury of denial.

At the same time Peggy and
I have had a week of personal dread, anxiety and some relief. A series of scans
and ultra-sounds revealed a tumor in her uterus. In a separate matter a biopsy
came back positive for a lesion on her hand. The latter will be removed in a
procedure on Tuesday. We await word from an oncological gynecologist for the
former. One doctor cheered us with the opinion that it may well be something of
long duration and benign.

Amazing how certain words
can alter body chemistry. Benign is
certainly one of them along with negative when it means something affirmative.
Just as mass, malignant and metastasize send the neuro-transmitters
into survival mode.

The macro and micro have also
come together for me in past years. The day JFK was shot in Dallas I had just
returned from a doctor with the news that my daughter Janice was first diagnosed with possible congenital deafness. We had suspected but dispelled the notion. It
was the day before her first birthday.

The two events have been associated in
my head ever since.

I have also joined, in my
mind, the assassination of Robert Kennedy with my daughter Lauren’s first
encounter with juvenile arthritis in 1968. Her elevated sedimentation rate inflamed
her joints just as our country felt to me like it was coming apart at the
seams.

It makes me wonder if
troubled times have a way of spreading across my entire landscape. No, I won’t
allow it. Whether the Republicans have their way with this nominee or the next
one on their list the tide of history shall ultimately prevail. Women are taking
back their agency, their bodies. Sex between one consenting adult is done.

It is all of a piece. The
sexual abuse. The tribunal of disbelieving men twisting a trauma into a political vendetta. And the intemporate nominee to the High
Court. Each of Trump’s candidates is an anticipated vote to overturn Roe v Wade
robbing women of their reproductive rights. Life is indeed sacred. That’s why
we have birthdays. Pregnant women cannot ride in carpool lanes. We are not
suddenly nine months older than we think we are. If Republicans really held
life sacred they would not display calloused indifference for human life, once born.
So-called Right-to-Life is a hoax wrapped in a cloak of bogus religiosity.

Forty-five years ago John
Dean described a cancer growing in the Nixon White House. Today that virulence
in the executive has metastasized into the Republican Senate. Grassley and
Graham et al (except Sen. Flake) turned a deaf ear to Dr. Ford’s story and voiced
outrage in defense of their client as if spokesmen for the Good Old Boys’ Club.
They were the voice of male chauvinist porcines snorting in a vanishing mud.
May predatory men and out-of-control cancer cells no longer have dominion.

Friday, September 21, 2018

But I can't come to the phone right now. I’m too busy
thinking great thoughts and looking for good news. If you are calling about
molestation and harassment by Hollywood, the Holy Hierarchy or High Court, press one. If you
are calling about derangement in the White House, press two. Melting glaciers
and estranged polar bears, press three. Homeless folks living in cardboard
boxes while the Dow is bursting its buttons, press 4. If you are asking for
contributions to the policemen’s ball leave your message before the beep. If you
are calling to tell us that Peggy’s Cat-Scan got mixed up with somebody else’s
leave a message after the beep.

The morning newspaper is filled with stories of
bodies buried in a typhoon landslide, 124 immigrants found packed in a cargo
truck, opioid drug overdose and a variety of mayhem and misdemeanors. Cable stations are feasting on bulletins of disaster. Netflix is bloated with serial killers, epidemics,
carnage and apocalyptic scenarios.

As a kid I followed WW II in the New York Times. I remember
feeling some pride learning how to hang onto the subway strap with one hand and
folding the paper with the other. The pages were all about Allied retreats and
advances, bombings, surrenders, liberations and maps of Pacific islands. It was
a geography lesson. It all ended in the summer of ’45 and I wondered what there would be to write about. It seems that bad news is inexhaustible. Even in good
times I read somewhere there are always about two dozen small wars going on
which apparently don’t merit our attention.

Maybe some bad guy died. Does that count as good
news? It’s probably why some people watch the Hallmark channel. Here’s a story
of a woman living in her car for the past year who, along with four others, found a room in a five-bedroom
condo through some charity.

The macro doesn’t match the micro. Just last week a
woman let me ahead of her on line at the check-stand with my three items. The bonsai
plant is still looking pleased with itself. That book the library claimed I
didn’t return turned up on their shelves and they apologized. The honey dew I
bought in August is almost ripe enough to open. At least I asked if it was
ready and it didn’t protest.

Contrary to the impression left by Breaking News I don’t know any mass
murderers, double agents, or human traffickers. I’ve yet to have lunch with a suicide
bomber or been targeted by a drone. There have been no jack-knifed big rigs on
our street. Dog-walkers bag their poop.

Singularly we are a noble lot. We hold the elevator
door for each other. We stop (more or less) at stop signs and may grumble over
prices but don’t blow up the market. There is no one on the road to incite me
into rage. For the most part the milk of human kindness flows in every vein.
And yet as we cling to some sort of neo-tribal identity the beast within is
given legitimacy. We regress to feral-survivor mode as if…

We’re experiencing a high call volume. Your expected
wait-time is seven hours. Best to call back between midnight and three when
you can be assured no one will answer the phone.As for that Cat-Scan, we
are dealing with it. Peggy lives by these words of wisdom: No Resistance.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Saturday between noon and one o’clock we’d be there
inching our way across an aisle in the dark theater, my brother and I. It
didn’t matter that the movie had started. Being four years older he was stuck
with me; I was five, plus or minus. We were probably well-prepared for a long
afternoon with boxes of Jujubes, Necco wafers and assorted agents of tooth
decay and future zits.

We would stay until we could say, This is where we came in. How many
movies did I watch starting in the middle and working itself to the end and
then the beginning? You might think that the lesson would have taught me that
life is cyclic like the seasons. But it didn’t quite take. The counter
narrative is linear sequential.

I expect most of us behave as if the world started
when we fell to earth. Page one. Anything before was preamble. Progression was
assumed, corresponding to our own growing up. Life in the 1930s was simple
because I was a simpleton and my senses were rudimentary. See Dick run … and he
did.

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger sang union songs
extolling the working class. You can’t
scare me I’m sticking with the union…till the day I die, went one song.
Another lyric was, They say in Harlan
County there are no neutrals there / You either are a union man or a thug for
J.H. Blair. Blair was a coal mine owner who probably had brought in scab
labor during a strike.

In today’s world of the absurd we have descendants of
these mine-workers voting for Blair’s would-be chum, Donald Trump. This isn’t
progress. It is regression. Some sort of twisted dictatorship of the proletariat.
Karl Marx had it all wrong. The down-trodden masses have turned into the mob
and cast their lot with the guy in the penthouse. The forgotten are led by the
misbegotten. The sit-down strikers of the thirties are now marching to the
hokum of a flimflam man.

We knew those fat cats back in the day. Sydney
Greenstreet, Edward Arnold, Eugene Pallette and Charles Coburn weighed in at about
half a ton. They nearly always played the filthy rich tycoons indifferent to
the man asking, Brother, can you spare a dime.

As Ma Joad said in the Grapes of Wrath: Rich fellas
come up an’ they die and their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep
a’comin. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us.
We’ll go on forever, Pa, cause we’re the people.

Yes, the people keep on coming but they took a wrong
turn, it seems to me, back in Vietnam war days when unions of hard hats mistook
it for WWII and felt left out of the social upheaval. They became misaligned
with their own welfare and miscast with the generals and war profiteers.

Oliver Hardy famously said to Stan Laurel, Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into. Their movies were part of
my Saturday matinee menu along with the double feature, newsreels, March of
Dimes collection, Looney Tunes, and a serial such as The Lone Ranger. We are
currently in a bigger mess than Stan Laurel ever imagined and no William Tell
Overture to signal the return of the masked Ranger or Tonto to set the world
right.

Another Laurel quote: I had a dream that I was awake and woke up to find myself asleep. America
is half asleep under the spell of malarkey. There is a card sharp robber baron
and his band of cattle rustlers running the show with tacit support from the
town folk. I am waiting for the part when the clean-shaven sheriff calls them
out. It is high noon at the O.K. Corral. I’m waiting for the drunken doctor to
sober up. For the schoolmarm to ring the bell and the saloon-keeper to prohibit
brawls and shoot-outs. For the decent poor folk to figure out how their bread
is buttered and stop shooting themselves in the foot. I can't leave now. I'm waiting for the
scene when I can say, This is where we
came in.

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Rumor (which I just started) has it that when Trump
heard Stormy was in bed with laryngitis he shouted, Damn those Greeks. He was overheard uttering the same epitaph when
told the New York Times op-ed piece was written by Anonymous. Who knew our
inspirational leader was a classical Hellenistic scholar.

Perhaps he was drawn to the Greeks when told that
their early version of Democracy included slaves and that hubris was a feature of Greek heroes ... before they had their comeuppance.
Trump has enjoyed many highlight moments usurping the prerogatives of the Gods.
Zeus, himself, that old mischievous hurler of lightning tweets, when he wasn’t
having his way with nubile nymphs, would surely have taken umbrage with our
Donald. The Olympians didn’t suffer fools gladly.

Sparta, rather than Athens, might have been a better
fit. Bone spurs to the contrary notwithstanding, he would not have shied away
from an invasion or two. And certainly there would be no skimping on parades. Of
course, any military action would have been fought by lesser men, the fools and
losers. Trump would have watched from his eponymous (another Greek) Tower
demonstrating his Edifice Complex.

To prove his immersion in all things Greek Trump
follows Socrates dictum that the unexamined
life is not worth living. He has tweaked it by declaring that the
unexamined Tax Return is not worth showing. As for Plato’s assertion that we
are mere shadows on the wall Trump seeks to test the notion by building a
three-thousand mile wall. In the world of mythology heroes routinely kill
dragons.Rather than look inside at his
own demons he has set out to kill the imagined one, namely, Government. Had he
directed his angst against corporate greed we might have reason to hail him.

He has identified with Narcissus fixed as he is with his
own face and hair. Opposing women’s control over their reproductive rights
Trump might have looked toward ancient Greece where many an unwanted baby was
set out among the rocks or caves …only to pop up years later (Ion and Oedipus)
with dire consequences.

But Trump is, archetypically speaking, the Trickster. Though that designation
insults the coyote. He certainly is not the disguised shaman or healer. His
forked tongue may be his Achilles heel having put his foot in his mouth so
often. He is part Odysseus with duplicity and deceit and part Orpheus charming
his way into the underbelly while he lip-syncs the illusory dread in the Heartland.

My guess is Trump’s favorite Greek name is Xeno,
meaning strange voice; hence xenophobia, that base fear which he has inflamed among
his fearful base. Damn those Greeks.

Friday, September 7, 2018

In a recurrent nightmarish day-dream I’m the last one
standing. Aliens have arrived and I’m there to greet the spaceship hoping, at
least, for someone to have lunch with. After the usual small talk about our
respective planets and what went wrong with mine I ask what took them so long.
The pilot apologizes because they’ve been monitoring our decline and fall for
many moons, alarmed at our recent planetary suicide but he says they just
didn’t make the lights.

The three-eyed android who more resembles an
over-sized grasshopper or an under-sized rhinoceros, remarkably, speaks a
perfect English. Good thing because I only took Trash as a second language. It
had been a while since I’d spoken at all and found myself fluent, at first, only
in gibberish till I regained use of my tongue.

He then turns to a pile of what we used to call
technology inquiring how all the gadgetry works. I dread the moment and plead
total ignorance. Fearful of raising his hackles I try to explain that we
earthlings used a lot of things but most of us had no idea how anything worked.
His hackles did indeed rise. I worried that some form of inter-galactic enhanced
interrogation was coming in which I might find myself impaled on one his
hackles.

He seemed to accept my ignorance since, after all, we
had convincingly demonstrated our collective stupidity by electing an infantile
despot to lead our nation. The visitors regretted their delayed arrival and
having to deal with such a poor specimen as me to enlighten them on our human
progress. I could only assure them that there used to live among us some who could
explain how the loom with its punch cards led to player pianos and eventually
to programming the computer. I told him there were a few of us undaunted by hot
wires or hard drives who could fiddle with links and algorithms and blue teeth
and black holes. If one of those had survived they could build it all over
again from a handful of dust. However I was not the guy.

All I had to offer was the paper clip, coat hanger
and orange juice squeezer none of which he had ever seen before. We agreed to
call it a start and besides it would take a lot more than things to get it right next time around.